The Riddle of the Sands: A Record of Secret Service (Penguin Classics Series) [NOOK Book]

Overview

While on a sailing trip in the Baltic Sea, two young adventurers-turned-spies uncover a secret German plot to invade England. Written by Childers—who served in the Royal Navy during World War I—as a wake-up call to the British government to attend to its North Sea defenses, The Riddle of the Sands accomplished that task and has been considered a classic of espionage literature ever since, praised as much for its nautical action as for its suspenseful spycraft.

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Overview

While on a sailing trip in the Baltic Sea, two young adventurers-turned-spies uncover a secret German plot to invade England. Written by Childers—who served in the Royal Navy during World War I—as a wake-up call to the British government to attend to its North Sea defenses, The Riddle of the Sands accomplished that task and has been considered a classic of espionage literature ever since, praised as much for its nautical action as for its suspenseful spycraft.

Editorial Reviews

Dennis Drabelle

Just as Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White (1860) is not only the progenitor of all mystery novels but still one of the best ever written, so Erskine Childers's The Riddle of the Sands (1903) is a pioneering spy novel—and still near the top of the heap.
—The Washington Post

Publishers Weekly

An insightful introduction by the author's great-grandson distinguishes this reissue of a seminal work of spy fiction first published in 1903. At the dawn of the 20th century, Carruthers, a young Foreign Office functionary, is lamenting being stuck in London with little to do when he receives a surprising communiqué from Oxford classmate Arthur Davies. Davies's request to join him on a yacht in Schleswig-Holstein includes an eccentric laundry-list of items that Davies wants his friend to bring. With nothing else on his horizon, Carruthers accepts, and ends up enmeshed in intrigue centering on Davies's concern that Germany's growing sea-power poses a threat to England. Childers (1870–1922) couples his patiently developed plot with richly imagined lead characters. Davies himself is the standout, rounded out by numerous quirks, including a craving for throwing items overboard from his small vessel. Eric Ambler fans will find this a fascinating antecedent. (Feb.)

From the Publisher

Library Journal
- BookSmack!

This 1903 book often is credited as being the first espionage thriller. The plot follows Carruthers, a minor officer in Britain's Foreign Office who is invited by an old college pal to go yachting in the Baltic. He gets far more than a boat ride, as the trip is a masquerade for discovering Germany's plan for attacking England. In a case of life imitating art, Childers himself eventually was drawn into international politics and stood before a firing squad for his role in the war for Irish independence (buy that man a pint of Guinness!). This edition also includes an intro by his great-grandson and maps of the areas covered in the story. Spy thriller fans will be all over this one. — "Classic Returns," Booksmack! 2/3/11

The Barnes & Noble Review

Young people looking for adventure fiction now generally turn to fantasy, but for those of a certain age the spy thriller has long been the escape reading of choice. Like many teenagers, I devoured the exploits of James Bond, but also those of 007's American cousins, in particular Donald Hamilton's Matt Helm (The Ambushers, The Intriguers, et al.), Edward S. Aaron's Sam Durell (Assignment: Ankara, Assignment: Sulu Sea, et al.), and Philip Atlee's Joe Gall (The Paper Pistol Contract, The Silken Baroness Contract, et al.). Am I alone in remembering with fondness John Craig in James Munro's The Man Who Sold Death and its three sequels? Of course, for titillation, as well as comic book–style action, one could always rely on Peter O'Donnell's adventures of the quite literally stunning Modesty Blaise, who could gain the drop on the bad guys by simply entering a room topless.

These books were all very much action-oriented. Not so, the more cerebral thrillers of the 1960s and '70s. Len Deighton's The Ipcress File introduced a shrewd working-class operative without a name, while John le Carré's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy made espionage almost bureaucratic, a more deadly variety of corporate intrigue. But le Carré was also a master of intricate plot construction, deeply knowledgeable of the tradecraft and technical aspects of spying, and, above all, a superb stylist, in fact a literary author at heart. Most of all, his books were, and are, moral dramas, as well as political ones.

The roots of that deeper kind of spy thriller go back to Erskine Childers's The Riddle of the Sands (1903). On the back cover of the recent Penguin edition it is no surprise, then, to find a blurb from Le Carré: "Vibrant, impassioned, witty, intelligent and shamelessly prejudiced in the manner of its day, The Riddle of the Sands remains one of the great foundation stones of the contemporary novel of espionage and adventure with political teeth." Other commentators have simply called it the first great modern spy novel.

But this is arguable.

Rudyard Kipling's Kim appeared two years earlier and, set in India, focuses on how a young street urchin is trained for "the Great Game," the seemingly never-ending struggle for control of Central Asia. The other early espionage classic is, of course, John Buchan's The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915), the story of Richard Hannay, wrongly suspected of murder and soon on the run across Britain, eluding capture by both the police and enemy agents, and ultimately discovering the dark meaning of the code words "the thirty-nine steps."

John Buchan would go on to write many similar pursuit thrillers, but he himself judged The Riddle of the Sands "the best story of adventure published in the last quarter of a century." As he went on to say in his 1926 preface to a reissue of that novel:

It is a tale of the puzzling out of a mystery which only gradually reveals itself, and not till the very end reaches its true magnificence; but its excitement begins on the first page, and there is a steady crescendo of interest.

Buchan adds, "As for the characters, I think they are the most fully realized of any adventure story that I have met, and the atmosphere of grey northern skies and miles of yeasty water and wet sands is as masterfully reproduced as in any of Conrad's."

Erskine Childers's novel opens in the first week of September, presumably a year or two before 1903. Carruthers, a somewhat foppish young Oxford graduate working for the Foreign Office, is bored with his deskbound life. His friends have all gone off shooting or fishing for their holidays and he's feeling left out. After all, he's been stuck all summer in London largely because of the caprice of one of his superiors and partly because of an unnamed "cloud on the international horizon." At just this moment, Carruthers unexpectedly receives a letter from a former university acquaintance named Davies, who invites him to go sailing around the Baltic. Davies offers further temptation with talk of some excellent duck shooting.

"The letter," writes Carruthers, "marked an epoch for me; but I little suspected the fact as I crumpled it into my pocket." After dithering a bit, Carruthers decides to go, though he is a bit disconcerted by Davies's request that he bring with him, along with two rifles, rigging screws, oilskin rain gear, some Raven Mixture tobacco, a prismatic compass, and a No. 3 Rippingille stove. Somewhat resentfully, he rounds up all this gear and makes his way to Flensburg, Germany, where he is to rendezvous on September 26th with Davies and the yacht Dulcibella.

There both young men are in for a shock.

When Davies appears, he is dressed in "an old Norfolk jacket, muddy brown shoes, grey flannel trousers (or had they been white?) and an ordinary tweed cap." Carruthers has naturally brought along proper yachting clothes, appropriate to a pleasure cruise WITH lots of drinks and good food and chaps to raise the anchor, trim the sails and what not. As it turns out, the Dulcibella is just a thirty-foot flat-bottomed boat, drawing very little water when the centerboard is up. Davies admits he can actually sail her alone, though life is easier and more pleasant with a companion.

Childers makes sport of Carruthers's early days aboard the Dulcibella, and for a while the novel is almost a reprise, with a slight reduction in number, of Jerome K. Jerome's comic Three Men in a Boat. But, gradually, as Carruthers and the reader are introduced to the intricacies of sailing a small vessel in tidal estuaries, amid shifting sand bars, the narrative begins to darken. Why did Davies want Carruthers to join him? Could it have something to do with the latter's fluent command of German? Why does Davies repeatedly urge that they should work their way into the North Sea, where he had been sailing a few weeks earlier? His curiosity aroused, Carruthers skims through the ship's log and discovers that the pages covering three days in early September have been torn out.

Compared to modern spy novels, The Riddle of the Sands develops very slowly. For much of its first third, the book seems primarily an account of in-shore sailing on the Baltic, with occasional storms for excitement. Little wonder that the novel has been regularly reprinted as a classic of nautical fiction, and long been a particular favorite of amateur yachtsmen.

Still, these early pages do chart Carruther's education in seeing, since piloting, navigation and general seamanship require close observation of wind, water and weather. To a great degree, Childers's novel revolves around detecting that which is hidden, whether a channel or a sandbar, a secret operation or a person's true self.

One day, when all boats are confined to port because of fog, a garrulous German barge captain casually refers to how he saved Davies from disaster and likely death when, during a gale, the Dulicbella ran aground in a treacherous passage near one of the Frisian Islands. Carruthers can't bear it any longer: What was Davies doing there? Finally, the full story comes out — and before long the two young men, now friends, are cautiously, almost surreptitiously making their way back to the North Sea.

It will, however, prove to be far more than "a gay pursuit of a perilous quest" or one of those stories "from the six penny magazines" about a spy "with a Kodak in his tie-pin, a sketchbook in the lining of his coat, and a selection of disguises in his hand luggage." There is, for example, the matter of the sleekly powerful yacht Medusa. And a certain girl named Clara. And a stealthy night visitor to the Dulcibella. The enthralled reader, like any good sailor watching the sea and sky, should pay close attention to everything — even those old naval histories and memoirs that Davies almost throws overboard. And hang on: The book is soon moving faster and faster.

If you look at the title page of The Riddle of the Sands, it reads "A Record of Secret Service Recently Achieved. Edited by Erskine Childers, Author of In the Ranks of the C.I.V. With Two Maps and Two Charts." It hardly sounds like a novel at all. There's even a preface in which we're told that Carruthers came to Childers and related all the discoveries made on his voyages with Davies. These were duly communicated to "the proper authorities" and had served "to avert a great national danger." But, all too typically, the government seems to have taken no long-term action. Hence, Carruthers now wishes to bring this important information to the public, and asks Childers to make the material into an entertaining narrative so as to attract a wide circle of readers. What matters most, he insists, is getting the book's warning message across to as many people as possible.

What is that message? Childers himself was an avid small-craft sailor, with a passion for exploring the North Sea and the German coast. The maps and charts he includes are detailed views of this territory, and especially the area around the Frisian Islands and the resort city of Norderney. (An aside: Some readers may recall Isak Dinesen's wonderful story set there in Seven Gothic Tales, "The Deluge at Norderney.") It doesn't take a Sherlock Holmes to deduce that the secret involves possible conflict with Germany. As Carruthers ominously says: "She grows, and strengthens, and waits."

In this regard, The Riddle of the Sands may be viewed as a distinguished example among those many contemporary novels and stories that imagine a great war in the near future. As early as 1871 George Chesney's The Battle of Dorking depicted a German invasion of England, and as late as July1914 Arthur Conan Doyle's "Danger!" warned of England's vulnerability to submarine attack. Even comic writers addressed the theme: In P. G. Wodehouse's The Swoop (1909), an English Boy Scout saves his country; in Saki's When William Came (1913), Germany has conquered and colonized Britain.

It is almost disconcerting, then, that in The Riddle of the Sands Davies frequently expresses not hatred but admiration for the Germans, as individuals and as a people, as sailors and as engineers. He even weeps at a memorial to her fallen soldiers and has nothing but praise for the kaiser, who he says works hard for his country and looks to its future. Nonetheless, Davies remains a heart-of-oak Englishman, patriotic to the core. By the end, he and Carruthers risk their lives to alert the Admiralty to . . .

Well, I won't say what. But before a climax that depends upon the inexorable movement of the tide, the two friends will make a daring sea journey by night, try desperately to decipher a few enigmatic clues that may or may not refer to a mysterious salvage operation, wonder who if anyone can be trusted, shake off inscrutable enemy agents, unmask a traitor, and, not least, rescue a beautiful young woman. As always in early spy fiction, hardened professionals are no match for plucky amateurs.

One last note: I haven't said much about Erskine Childers (1870–1922), but his life is even more sensational than his novel (the only one he ever wrote), though it comes without a happy ending. Educated at Cambridge and a longtime clerk to the House of Commons, Childers served bravely in the Boer War and rose to the rank of major in World War I, earning Britain's Distinguished Service Cross. But he was Irish on his mother's side and eventually committed himself to the outlawed republican struggle for an independent Ireland. Captured during the civil war with a small pistol (supposedly a gift from Michael Collins), he was imprisoned as a terrorist and then, partly as an example to others, executed in 1922. He accepted his fate calmly and seems to have even welcomed his chance to die as a martyr to a cause he firmly, even fanatically, believed in. His last words were to the firing squad: "Take a step or two forwards, lads. It will be easier that way."

Michael Dirda is a Pulitzer Prize–winning columnist for The Washington Post Book World. He is the author of the memoir An Open Book and several collections of essays, including Classics for Pleasure. His latest book, On Conan Doyle, has been published by Princeton University Press

Related Subjects

Meet the Author

Erskine Childers (1870-1922) was an expert yachtsman whose sailing experiences were fictionalized in The Riddle of the Sands. An Irish nationalist, he was executed by the authorities of the nascent Irish Free State during the Irish Civil War. Bernard Knox is director emeritus of Harvard's Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington, D.C.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

The Letter

I have read of men who, when forced by their calling to live for long periods in utter solitude–save for a few black faces–have made it a rule to dress regularly for dinner in order to maintain their self-respect and prevent a relapse into barbarism. It was in some such spirit, with an added touch of self-consciousness, that, at seven o’clock in the evening of 23rd September in a recent year, I was making my evening toilet in my chambers in Pall Mall. I thought the date and the place justified the parallel; to my advantage even; for the obscure Burmese administrator might well be a man of blunted sensibilities and coarse fibre, and at least he is alone with nature, while I–well, a young man of condition and fashion, who knows the right people, belongs to the right clubs, has a safe, possibly a brilliant, future in the Foreign Office–may be excused for a sense of complacent martyrdom, when, with his keen appreciation of the social calendar, he is doomed to the outer solitude of London in September. I say “martyrdom,” but in fact the case was infinitely worse. For to feel oneself a martyr, as everybody knows, is a pleasurable thing, and the true tragedy of my position was that I had passed that stage. I had enjoyed what sweets it had to offer in ever dwindling degree since the middle of August, when ties were still fresh and sympathy abundant. I had been conscious that I was missed at Morven Lodge party. Lady Ashleigh herself had said so in the kindest possible manner, when she wrote to acknowledge the letter in which I explained, with an effectively austere reserve of language, that circumstances compelled me to remain at my office. “We know how busy you must be just now,” she wrote, “and I do hope you won’t overwork; we shall all miss you very much.” Friend after friend “got away” to sport and fresh air, with promises to write and chaffing condolences, and as each deserted the sinking ship, I took a grim delight in my misery, positively almost enjoying the first week or two after my world had been finally dissipated to the four bracing winds of heaven. I began to take a spurious interest in the remaining five millions, and wrote several clever letters in a vein of cheap satire, indirectly suggesting the pathos of my position, but indicating that I was broad-minded enough to find intellectual entertainment in the scenes, persons, and habits of London in the dead season. I even did rational things at the instigation of others. For, though I should have liked total isolation best, I, of course, found that there was a sediment of unfortunates like myself, who, unlike me, viewed the situation in a most prosaic light. There were river excursions, and so on, after office-hours; but I dislike the river at any time for its noisy vulgarity, and most of all at this season. So I dropped out of the fresh air brigade and declined H–’s offer to share a riverside cottage and run up to town in the mornings. I did spend one or two week-ends with the Catesbys in Kent; but I was not inconsolable when they let their house and went abroad, for I found that such partial compensations did not suit me. Neither did the taste for satirical observation last. A passing thirst, which I dare say many have shared, for adventures of the fascinating kind described in the New Arabian Nights led me on a few evenings into some shady haunts in Soho and farther eastward; but was finally quenched one sultry Saturday night after an hour’s immersion in the reeking atmosphere of a low music-hall in Ratcliffe Highway, where I sat next a portly female who suffered from the heat, and at frequent intervals refreshed herself and an infant from a bottle of tepid stout.

By the first week in September I had abandoned all palliatives, and had settled into the dismal but dignified routine of office, club, and chambers. And now came the most cruel trial, for the hideous truth dawned on me that the world I found so indispensable could after all dispense with me. It was all very well for Lady Ashleigh to assure me that I was deeply missed; but a letter from F–, who was one of the party, written “in haste, just starting to shoot,” and coming as a tardy reply to one of my cleverest, made me aware that the house party had suffered little from my absence, and that few sighs were wasted on me, even in the quarter which I had assumed to have been discreetly alluded to by the underlined all in Lady Ashleigh’s “we shall all miss you.” A thrust which smarted more, if it bit less deeply, came from my cousin Nesta, who wrote: “It’s horrid for you to have to be baking in London now; but, after all, it must be a great pleasure to you” (malicious little wretch!) “to have such interesting and important work to do.” Here was a nemesis for an innocent illusion I had been accustomed to foster in the minds of my relations and acquaintances, especially in the breasts of the trustful and admiring maidens whom I had taken down to dinner in the last two seasons; a fiction which I had almost reached the point of believing in myself. For the plain truth was that my work was neither interesting nor important, and consisted chiefly at present in smoking cigarettes, in saying that Mr. So-and-So was away and would be back about 1st October, in being absent for lunch from twelve till two, and in my spare moments making précis of–let us say–the less confidential consular reports, and squeezing the results into cast-iron schedules. The reason of my detention was not a cloud on the international horizon–though I may say in passing that there was such a cloud–but a caprice on the part of a remote and mighty personage, the effect of which, ramifying downwards, had dislocated the carefully-laid holiday plans of the humble juniors, and in my own small case had upset the arrangement between myself and K–, who positively liked the dog-days in Whitehall.

Only one thing was needed to fill my cup of bitterness, and this it was that specially occupied me as I dressed for dinner this evening. Two days more in this dead and fermenting city and my slavery would be at an end. Yes, but–irony of ironies!–I had nowhere to go to! The Morven Lodge party was breaking up. A dreadful rumour as to an engagement which had been one of its accursed fruits tormented me with the fresh certainty that I had not been missed, and bred in me that most desolating brand of cynicism which is produced by defeat through insignificance. Invitations for a later date, which I had declined in July with a gratifying sense of being much in request, now rose up spectrally to taunt me. There was at least one which I could easily have revived, but neither in this case nor in any other had there been any renewal of pressure, and there are moments when the difference between proposing oneself and surrendering as a prize to one of several eagerly competing hostesses seems too crushing to be contemplated. My own people were at Aix for my father’s gout; to join them was a pis aller whose banality was repellent. Besides, they would be leaving soon for our home in Yorkshire, and I was not a prophet in my own country. In short, I was at the extremity of depression.

The usual preliminary scuffle on the staircase prepared me for the knock and entry of Withers. (One of the things which had for some time ceased to amuse me was the laxity of manners, proper to the season, among the servants of the big block of chambers where I lived.) Withers demurely handed me a letter bearing a German post-mark and marked “Urgent.” I had just finished dressing, and was collecting my money and gloves. A momentary thrill of curiosity broke in upon my depression as I sat down to open it. A corner on the reverse of the envelope bore the blotted legend: “Very sorry, but there’s one other thing–a pair of rigging screws from Carey and Neilson’s, size 1 3/8, galvanized.” Here it is:

Yacht Dulcibella, Flensburg, Schleswig-Holstein, 21st Sept.

Dear Carruthers, I daresay you’ll be surprised at hearing from me, as it’s ages since we met. It is more than likely, too, that what I’m going to suggest won’t suit you, for I know nothing of your plans, and if you’re in town at all you’re probably just getting into harness again and can’t get away. So I merely write on the offchance to ask if you would care to come out here and join me in a little yachting, and, I hope, duck shooting. I know you’re keen on shooting, and I sort of remember that you have done some yachting too, though I rather forget about that. This part of the Baltic–the Schleswig fiords–is a splendid cruising-ground–A1 scenery–and there ought to be plenty of duck about soon, if it gets cold enough. I came out here via Holland and the Frisian Islands, starting early in August. My pals have had to leave me, and I’m badly in want of another, as I don’t want to lay up yet for a bit. I needn’t say how glad I should be if you could come. If you can, send me a wire to the P.O. here. Flushing and on by Hamburg will be your best route, I think. I’m having a few repairs done here, and will have them ready sharp by the time your train arrives. Bring your gun and a good lot of No. 4â€™s; and would you mind calling at Lancaster’s and asking for mine, and bringing it too? Bring some oilskins. Better get the eleven-shilling sort, jacket and trousers–not the “yachting” brand; and if you paint bring your gear. I know you speak German like a native, and that will be a great help. Forgive this hail of directions, but I’ve a sort of feeling that I’m in luck and that you’ll come. Anyway, I hope you and the F.O. both flourish. Good-bye.

Yours ever, Arthur H. Davies.

Would you mind bringing me out a prismatic compass, and a pound of Raven Mixture.

This letter marked an epoch for me; but I little suspected the fact as I crumpled it into my pocket and started languidly on the voie douloureuse which I nightly followed to the club. In Pall Mall there were no dignified greetings to be exchanged now with well-groomed acquaintances. The only people to be seen were some late stragglers from the park, with a perambulator and some hot and dusty children lagging fretfully behind; some rustic sightseers draining the last dregs of the daylight in an effort to make out from their guide-books which of these reverend piles was which; a policeman and a builder’s cart. Of course the club was a strange one, both of my own being closed for cleaning, a coincidence expressly planned by Providence for my inconvenience. The club which you are “permitted to make use of” on these occasions always irritates with its strangeness and discomfort. The few occupants seem odd and oddly dressed, and you wonder how they got there. The particular weekly that you want is not taken in; the dinner is execrable, and the ventilation a farce. All these evils oppressed me to-night. And yet I was puzzled to find that somewhere within me there was a faint lightening of the spirits; causeless, as far as I could discover. It could not be Davies’s letter. Yachting in the Baltic at the end of September! The very idea made one shudder. Cowes, with a pleasant party and hotels handy, was all very well. An August cruise on a steam yacht in French waters or the Highlands was all very well; but what kind of a yacht was this? It must be of a certain size to have got so far, but I thought I remembered enough of Davies’s means to know that he had no money to waste on luxuries. That brought me to the man himself. I had known him at Oxford–not as one of my immediate set; but we were a sociable college, and I had seen a good deal of him, liking him for his physical energy combined with a certain simplicity and modesty, though, indeed, he had nothing to be conceited about; liked him, in fact, in the way that at that receptive period one likes many men whom one never keeps up with later. We had both gone down in the same year–three years ago now. I had gone to France and Germany for two years to learn the languages; he had failed for the Indian Civil, and then had gone into a solicitor’s office. I had only seen him since at rare intervals, though I admitted to myself that for his part he had clung loyally to what ties of friendship there were between us. But the truth was that we had drifted apart from the nature of things. I had passed brilliantly into my profession, and on the few occasions I had met him since I made my triumphant début in society I had found nothing left in common between us. He seemed to know none of my friends, he dressed indifferently, and I thought him dull. I had always connected him with boats and the sea, but never with yachting, in the sense that I understood it. In college days he had nearly persuaded me into sharing a squalid week in some open boat he had picked up, and was going to sail among some dreary mud-flats somewhere on the east coast. There was nothing else, and the funereal function of dinner drifted on. But I found myself remembering at the entrée that I had recently heard, at second or third hand, of something else about him–exactly what I could not recall. When I reached the savoury, I had concluded, so far as I had centred my mind on it at all, that the whole thing was a culminating irony, as, indeed, was the savoury in its way. After the wreck of my pleasant plans and the fiasco of my martyrdom, to be asked as consolation to spend October freezing in the Baltic with an eccentric nonentity who bored me! Yet, as I smoked my cigar in the ghastly splendour of the empty smoking-room, the subject came up again. Was there anything in it? There were certainly no alternatives at hand. And to bury myself in the Baltic at this unearthly time of year had at least a smack of tragic thoroughness about it.

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Customer Reviews

Anonymous

Posted March 13, 2012

The Riddle is a classic among sailboat enthusiasts. The espionag

The Riddle is a classic among sailboat enthusiasts. The espionage is a little naive, but then, the genre has evolved. If you are not a sailing enthusiast, the parts concerning navigation could be tedious. It has been among my favorites for years, and I am glad to see it in e-book format. Far better than the movie.

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Anonymous

Posted April 21, 2006

A powerful flop!

The title of the Riddle of the Sands is exotic but beyond that - this is an unbelievably boring tale of two friends who come together at some godforsaken islands to reveal a British traitor. That¿s the gist of the novel. But what follows is a convoluted storyline full of slang, garbled nautical lingo rendered in half completed sentences that have no head or tail. Understanding such a text will require a supercomputer not to speak of a mere mortal. The writer seems to have written this book in some opium-induced hallucinatory trance. This is a heck of a one-way trip to self-congratulatory egotism, if I ever saw

1 out of 3 people found this review helpful.

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Anonymous

Posted November 3, 2013

Peace

Okay, so I've done a crap ton amount of moving in the past year and a half. If that's not time consuming enough for you, there was also packing and unpacking boxes of my house contents 7 times (yes I have lived in 7 different places since April 17, 2012. 8 if you count in a hotel for a month). I'm not going to go into detail why, because when I start rambling I can't stop. And now into the good part. BOTH KATE AND THE CLANS AND SILENT'S STORY WILL BE RE-WRITTEN AT NEW LOACATIONS. Why? Because I want to start fresh, and because in the time I've been gone I've kept writing and gotten better, and finally, because the current versions suck. How did I ever think that was good enough to show you awesome-sauce people? *Face-palm* so in the place of the old stories will be spam messages, probably somehing like "Peace was here" or whatever. I'll let you all know when the re-done versions are out and where they are in the first result. Bye! ~Peace

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Anonymous

Posted April 19, 2013

Atom

Rahhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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Anonymous

Posted April 21, 2013

Ross ro all

Im moving to rosses house all res

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